Transport for London hit by cyber attack as National Crime Agency launches major TfL probe
TRANSPORT for London warned they are "dealing with cyber attack" and the National Crime Agency has launched a probe.
TfL has urgently enlisted help from tech experts to figure out the cause of the breach.
It is believed early indications show customer data had not been compromised.
The transport network and services are also not understood to have been affected.
But the extent of damage caused is still unknown.
A warning message sent by the TfL Customer Information Team read: "We are currently dealing with an ongoing cyber security incident. At present there is no evidence that any customer data has been compromised and there has been no impact on TfL services.
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"The security of our systems and customer data is very important to us, and we have taken immediate action to prevent any further access to our systems.
"We are working closely with the relevant government agencies to respond to the incident.
"You can get the latest information on our website. We will update you further when the incident has been resolved."
Shashi Verma, TfL’s Chief Technology Officer, added today: “We have introduced a number of measures to our internal systems to deal with an ongoing cyber security incident.
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"The security of our systems and customer data is very important to us and we will continue to assess the situation throughout and after the incident.
“Although we’ll need to complete our full assessment, at present, there is currently no evidence that any customer data has been compromised.
"There is currently no impact to TfL services and we are working closely with the National Crime Agency and the National Cyber Security Centre to respond to the incident.”
It comes after a cyber attack on the NHS forced major UK hospitals to cancel operations in June this year.
The hack was carried out by group of Russian cyber criminals.
Qilin hacked a private contractor which runs pathology services for the NHS across much of London.
The cyber-gang, behind dozens of similar attacks, is said to have seized control of the IT network crippling services such as diagnostic blood testing and blood transfusions.
As reported by the BBC, the cyber criminal group also allegedly shared almost 400GB of data.
This included patient names, dates of birth, NHS numbers and descriptions of blood tests.
Meanwhile, in July, a cyber attack on Microsoft saw a global meltdown and IT outage.
It grounded flights, disrupted emergency services, halted hospital appointments, newsrooms, television networks and businesses worldwide.
The so-called Microsoft meltdown, which lasted about 20 hours, is reported to have cost the economy an estimated $24billion - or £18billion.
One expert told The Sun it was the closest the world has ever come to the long-fabled "digital apocalypse".
The tech giant was then hit by a second outage affecting a handful of Microsoft services, as well as videogame Minecraft, less than two weeks later.
The most recent disruption affected airports, such as Heathrow, the UK's largest travel hub, and some banks.
Microsoft deployed multiple engineering teams to investigate the issue.
A preliminary investigation shows the outage was caused by a cyberattack that tech defences failed to combat.
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The hack was a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack.
The company issues an apology for the incident, which lasted about 10 hours, and impacted thousands of users.
